A common mistake among new entrepreneurs who have raised large rounds is that they have essentially infinite resources.
— Joe Lonsdale
While it can be overwhelming to realize how many problems there are to solve in the world, it's always inspiring to see so many talented people willing to spend their time and energy in hopes of making a difference.
Backing a company is a serious business.
The convertible note is a useful and common financing structure in Silicon Valley. It's a form of debt that is really more a type of equity - one where the valuation hasn't been determined yet.
We founded Palantir in 2003-2004 because we perceived a giant gap between how the defense and intelligence community was harnessing technology to achieve its goals and what we had seen was possible in Silicon Valley over the last decade.
Being able to access that Stanford alumni network was huge - I actually interned at PayPal while I was at Stanford and learned a lot. Being in that environment and learning about it as a student was really fun.
There will be trillions of dollars under Addepar. You will have tons of money and information flowing through it.
Palantir is the new wave of companies solving big problems for big industries.
David and Ellen Siminoff are legends in Silicon Valley - they are two of the most influential mentors to top executives and leaders behind the scenes, with long track records of success.
The degree to which society creates wealth, I think, is largely determined by government and financial systems.
Basically, I think society functions thanks to how certain key industries work - government, finance, healthcare, education, energy. Pretty much all of these have a huge impact on everything else.
One of my biggest intellectual influences in my life was Alex Karp of Palantir.
Private equity firms working closely with venture capitalists and technologists may be able to unlock assets that others have not leveraged and build technology cultures to iterate on solutions that make these assets more productive.
The only way to create prosperity is to do more with less. In economic terms, an increase in productivity is an increase in the amount or quality of output generated for each unit of input. Jobs do not make society wealthier - productivity does.
When you solve big, hard problems, problems that fundamentally improve how an industry works, financial returns follow, giving you resources to do more of the same.
Fear is the wrong response to technological unemployment. Focusing on economic flexibility and adaptability - with special attention to eliminating the barriers we've accidentally created to the mobility of the working classes - is the right response to technological disruption.
The reason we have so much talent in Silicon Valley building and investing in for-profit technology companies is that markets richly reward successful ideas, no matter who invents them. But to remain competitive in a free market, companies must exercise discipline to meet quantitative goals and eventually become cashflow positive.
We want to inspire everyone to recognize the positive social impact they can have if they choose to become technologists.
Entrepreneurship is, in large part, about building something from nothing, which means creating a cause.
We created Addepar because we saw a place where a multi-billion dollar global platform clearly should exist - but did not yet - to fix many of the challenges that exist in the finance industry.
In a well-run tech company, small, elite groups who have ownership in the company are given the freedom to define and achieve their tasks in line with a broader mission that they have internalized as their own.
I think that the culture at Stanford really shapes how you view the world, and you get a lot more out of an entrepreneurial mindset.
I'm always investing and building things at the same time.
Creating efficiencies in private markets is a huge win for the economy.
Keeping government running really well, to me, is incredibly important.
If our society was a lot wealthier, I think we'd also probably have better education systems - this is pretty intuitive, I think, to make as a claim.
For me, seed investing isn't just a good return area but a big part of how we network in Silicon Valley. A lot of our best deals have come from being active in the seed stage.
Our family is very, very competitive. But it's a fun and inspiring sort of competitive. It makes you proud of what you do and makes you want to work hard and do all your homework so you can win.
Savvy, competitive investors able to build, buy, and fix companies will continue to stimulate growth by allowing us to do more with less - the only way to create prosperity.
Our best and brightest must conceive of themselves as stewards of our society and confront the critical challenges of our time. It's the best bet for our society, for entrepreneurs, and for the investors who believe in them.
Applying smarter IT to genomic data may offer the potential to cure many types of cancer and other diseases.
The human mind and body remains the most complex, powerful machine on the planet, and we will adapt and thrive in a world of accelerating technological change.
CEOs shouldn't worry about their budget all the time - on a day-to-day basis, they should work on managing their company, building an awesome product, developing key relationships, identifying distribution channels, etc.
Traditional hackathons are fun and focused on skill and competition, but we believe that events which focus on the positive social impact of technology engage a wider and more diverse set of participants.
We use convertible notes a lot at our fund - 8VC - so often that we just call them 'notes' to save time.
Addepar not only helps improve private wealth management workflows so that advisors can do a better job at what they currently do, but it also helps build a data-driven and integrated view on top of the many important financial decisions within a client portfolio.
A lot of the companies that I am inclined to get involved in have a mission to fix something that is 'broken' in the world.
If you can make finance more functional, make it a tiny percent better, you create a great deal of resources, which you can use for other things like education and healthcare.
I work 110-hour weeks.
Engineering talent is the most precious resource for any technology company - Palantir and Addepar are successful first and foremost because of their top tech cultures, and the same is true for our best portfolio companies at 8VC.
I think I was really lucky to work as a little kid at PayPal, grew up in the Valley as a coder.
I believe we live in a positive sum world and wealth isn't just taken or moved around; it's mostly created.
There are people who are better managers than I am. I aspire to be a really good manager, but it's not my natural personality to do the same thing for 14 hours a day. I have a lot of different interests. I really like product and strategy and business strategy, and I think I'm not bad at it.
I was really lucky about two things about my life as a kid: I had awesome parents, and I had awesome peers.
Private equity investors are an integral part of the economy and should be celebrated for making our country wealthier.
Not everybody has to work on the big problems, but if nobody does, they don't get solved.
Wealth is only ever actually created from the bottom-up, with free people employing their distinctly human creativity and finding ways to serve and employ others.
Technological unemployment is scary for those affected - but has always gone hand in hand with economic progress.
